


times i've tried to make breaks

by zenstrike



Series: you’re lucky that’s what i like [34]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: AND HAHAHA, Family Feels, Family Fluff, Friendship/Love, Gen, Growing Old, Growing Up, M/M, POV Adam, Wedding Planning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-12 16:22:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20567321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zenstrike/pseuds/zenstrike
Summary: He drummed his fingers against the table. “It’s a thing,” he said. “A wedding binder. It’s a thing.”“It is?”“Well,” Adam huffed. “In the movies, it is.”





	times i've tried to make breaks

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Diebazaal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Diebazaal/gifts).

> this is a commission for the wonderful diebazal, who asked for adashi fluff and wedding planning. this one kind of relies on both [they tangle down and then take flight](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16574408/chapters/38838119) and [the symbol of your love is time](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16712293).

“What’s it going to be like?” Keith asked, his chin and his elbows digging into the table while he watched Adam type. “The wedding, I mean.”

“The wedding?” Adam repeated, glancing briefly from his screen. Keith blinked back at him and Adam’s fingers twitched and his palms itched with sweat and he looked away.

“Duh,” Keith mumbled. “The wedding. Yours and Shiro’s. You know. When you get married?”

“I don’t know,” Adam replied gruffly. “It’ll be, you know, a wedding.” He paused. He pulled his hands back from his keyboard. With more, practiced, uncertain confidence, he added: “Yeah, it’ll be like a wedding.”

This quieted Keith for a moment. Silence settled over the kitchen again. Adam imagined Keith reaching for his book and smoothing his small hands over the pages and mouthing the words as he read along, hunched over it and the table and lost in the fantasy of it.

And then Keith said, “What’s a wedding like?”

“What?”

“Nevermind,” Keith said in a rush, pushing away from the table and slipping from the chair. “Nevermind!”

“It’s—” Adam started and then his voice failed.

Became sparkles on his tongue, became light along his teeth and blushing freckles on his cheeks.

“Keith,” he said as Keith snatched up his book and ducked his own blushing face.

“Nevermind,” Keith said again, insistent and loud and small all at once.

“Do you want to see my binder?” Adam blurted.

They stared at each other.

“Your what?”

Adam snapped his laptop shut and stood, his chair squeaking against the floor. “My binder,” he said again. He straightened his glasses. “My—wedding binder.”

“What’s a wedding binder?” Keith said, sounding both disgruntled and offended and Adam wanted to laugh and tease him for it. He seemed so—small, so young. Curious and annoyed all at once, like the thought of Adam’s binder was too ridiculous for contemplation.

Maybe it was.

Maybe Adam was two steps away from loving this boy, honestly and fully.

He drummed his fingers against the table. “It’s a thing,” he said. “A wedding binder. It’s a thing.”

“It is?”

“Well,” Adam huffed. “In the movies, it is.”

“Oh,” Keith said, serious and low.

“Do you want to see it?”

“I guess.”

“I will take a ‘yes’ or a ‘no.’”

“You get what you get!”

“Uh huh.”

Keith followed in a trot, his socked feet soft in the hallway and softer still in the bedroom. He shuffled closer when Adam opened the closet, the shoulders of Takashi’s least-worn shirts waving at them, and then he shuffled back when Adam reached for the top shelf and felt between boxes and discarded, lost gloves and old scarves.

His wedding planning binder was nondescript at best: snatched from a set of four they had ordered online years ago and never used, black and thin and glossy in that way unused, inexpensive binders could be. It squeaked and cracked when Adam opened it and the rings snapped open and shut unevenly.

It was barely—not empty.

Adam turned back and held the binder up with one hand, the other on his hip, and waved it. “This is what wedding planning looks like.”

Keith opened his mouth. Closed it. Hunched his shoulders and clutched his book to his side. “Okay,” he said. “So the wedding’s, like, inside of it?”

“Yup.”

“Liar.”

Adam rolled his eyes. “Fine. Don’t believe me.” He shrugged. “Guess you’ll just have to wait and see it.”

“What!”

“Yeah, no previews for you.”

Keith, scowling, eyed the binder. 

* * *

He kept simple things in it. 

A disordered guest list, where his own mother’s name was scratched out and rewritten and scratched out again, and where Takashi had left haphazard notes and doodles that were part mockery and part laughter and light. His love came out in small ways like that, sometimes: a note here, a breathy laugh there, a reminder of his presence at Adam’s side. Adam kept the mostly-empty page that served as their guest list at the front of the binder so it would be the first thing he saw every time he worked up the courage and energy to open it: proof that they loved each other, written in his narrow printing and Takashi’s scattered notes.

He started the binder three weeks after their engagement and long after all their engagement groceries were eaten. He had woken, suddenly, in the night and had stared up at their bedroom ceiling and then had scowled and jabbed at Takashi’s side until he grunted and rolled away.

“Takashi,” Adam had hissed.

“Guh.”

“Takashi!”

“What!”

“The wedding,” Adam had said, waving his hand in the dark and swallowing down his mounting anxiety. “How do we plan it?”

“Patiently,” Takashi had sighed and pressed his face into his pillow and went back to sleep.

Patiently, Adam had scoffed, and he had pulled himself out of their bed and scurried down their hall and tore into their storage room to find the flimsy black binder he’d never fill.

The binder took on a magical quality. He started with loose leaf pages and post-it notes that fell off almost immediately. He opened it and he stared at it and he imagined what he would fill it with: in the movies there were pages and pages, a giant binder of pages of wedding  _ stuff _ and eventually, he was sure, his binder would be full too. He printed pictures of camping sites and gardens and hotel patios that faced mountains and golf courses. He made a note: “pick flowers that don’t stink.” He made another note: “mini cakes.”

“What’s that?” Takashi asked over a breakfast of sugary cereal and too much coffee, weeks—maybe days, it all blurred together—before he met Keith.

Adam slapped a hand over the binder. “Nothing.”

“Liar.”

Adam’s lips twitched. “I’m planning our wedding,” he said and shoved a spoonful of Corn Pops in his mouth.

“Without me!”

“Get your own binder.”

“Maybe I will,” Takashi scoffed. He hooked a foot around Adam’s ankle, affectionate and warm, and leaned over his bowl with his elbows grinding into the table and his smile lighting up the room.

He looked young, and bright, and handsome. Looking at him, in the morning and with their lives unfolding in front of them, Adam thought he knew what forever looked like, and how it would change, and what their love looked like from the outside in. He thought he could see Takashi under the trees, or in front of the mountains, or just here in their little home, and Adam thought he could see them married.

Married.

* * *

“I want photos,” Takashi said one day, his eyes on the highway and the mountains at their back and Keith passed out in a sprawl against the backseat.

“Sure,” Adam grumbled, tapping at the edge of his novel’s cover. “Of what?”

“Of our wedding,” Takashi said. Laughed. “Wedding photos. Add that to your binder.”

“Huh.” Adam watched the road, the endless stretch of it, for a moment. He felt the prairies fall away and then rise up again to catch them. He felt the mountains like a tug in his gut that he’d forget by the evening, by the time they woke up Keith and unpacked the car and washed the last of the camping grime from their skins.

“Huh,” Takashi echoed, teasing.

“I hadn’t thought about photos. Like, a photographer. Wedding photos. Wedding albums. You know.”

“I do. Ergo, I brought it up.”

“I don’t think you’re using that word correctly.”

“Adam.”

“Takashi.”

“I’m serious.” Takashi drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. Keith snored from the back, loud and quick.

Adam twisted in his seat, seat belt dragging against his collarbone and the door cool against his arm and his back. “You want photos,” he said after a moment.

“Yeah,” Takashi said. “I want beautiful photos to put on our walls.” He said without mockery, without humour, and he said so plainly and firmly that Adam knew it was as true as truth could be.

“Okay,” Adam said. He straightened. “We can probably do that. We might even be able to wrestle Keith into a tie for them..” He smiled at the highway and flipped his novel shut and felt the weight of it on his thigh and the soft cloth of the cover under his hands. He reached, blindly, to his left, still smiling and still looking ahead and settled his hand against Takashi’s shoulder.

They were quiet for a time, the car humming and Keith breathing softly in his sleep. When Adam finally looked, Takashi was blinking at the road: again and again and again. 

“Takashi?”

“I love you,” Takashi replied. “That’s all. I love you and I can’t wait to marry you.”

“Oh,” Adam said.

He pulled his hand away and scratched idly at his chest, over his heart and to hide the little starbursts of warmth, the rise in his throat. He sniffed.

Marriage.

Starlight and sunsets and maybe that was them, on the horizon, growing old together and watching Keith live his life and holding hands years down the road and looking at each other and saying:  _ it was a good life, together; we didn’t waste a moment _ .

“Let’s pick a day,” Adam said to the window, his smile growing. “Tomorrow, let’s sit down and eat a lot of food and listen to Keith complain and let’s pick a day to get married.”

“Okay,” Takashi said. 

* * *

At home, clutching his toothbrush and peering out the door of the bathroom, Keith caught Adam’s eye and said: “You’re really going to get married, huh?”

Adam grinned. “I suppose we are.”

Keith nodded. He glanced at a spot on the floor and then looked back at Adam, his expression serious and fierce. “That’s good,” he said, like he had decided it in the moment.

* * *

February, they decided.

“Valentine’s Day?” Keith asked, peeling a cheese string.

“Nah,” Adam said with a wave of his hand. “That’s too much.”

“Also,” Takashi piped up, shoveling noodles and chicken balls onto a plate. “It’s expensive.”

Keith gave up on the cheese string and crammed the whole thing in his mouth. Chewing, he reached for the container of chicken balls and snatched one.

“A wedding in the snow,” Adam said thoughtfully.

“There’s gonna be boot tracks everywhere,” Keith said after he swallowed his cheese. He took an enormous bite of the chicken ball.

“That’s not going to ruin the romance,” Takashi promised. “Also, we’re not literally going to get married in the snow.”

Adam laughed.

February 7, they decided.

“We have to pick a venue,” Takashi mumbled, tapping his chopsticks against his teeth.

“A venue,” Keith echoed, sounding like he was feeling the words out on his tongue. “A venue for a wedding.”

“That’s right.”

“Like, a church.”

“No church.”

“Like a—gym.”

“A gym?”

“A gym! They can put up the basketball hoops in the gym at school, you know.”

“We’re not going to get married at your school.”

“Duh.”

Adam leaned his elbows on the table on either side of his binder and smiled as he listened to the conversation spiral, and spiral, and spiral, until Takashi was jabbing tickling fingers at Keith’s sides and Keith was shrieking his disapproval and most of the chicken balls were gone.

* * *

They found a community centre with huge windows and wood beams, a smell like cedar and mountain though Banff and Jasper were hours away. Adam knew it was the place when Takashi pressed his fingers to one of the beams and then turned back to smile.

Adam could see him, smiling and promising forever. Maybe they’d string lights. Maybe they’d pick white flowers, if they could find some that didn’t remind them both of funerals. Maybe Takashi would wear black, maybe Adam would sprinkle petals in his hair, maybe they’d have their first dance to something soft and soothing and romantic just so they’d have a proper excuse to lean into each other and feel the world turn with them.

* * *

Maybe that was it, in the end: Adam wanted too much.

The young woman who returned their deposit was apologetic and just shy of pouty, saying again and again: It’s too bad.

Yeah, Adam thought while he rubbed the spot on his finger where his ring had been.

Too bad.

* * *

The binder was one of the first things he unpacked in his new apartment, with its bare walls and its quiet rooms. He had a nice view, from his kitchen. The street was quiet. He started to imagine Keith doing his homework on the living room floor and then strangled his own hope and shelved the binder way at the back of his front closet.

It still had that magical quality. It carried grief, now.

Sometimes he dug it out. When he drank too much, or he had a long day, or he spent an hour on the phone talking to Takashi and remembering why he had loved him. When he flipped through it, the puny pile of papers and the bright images and the crinkling corners, he thought he was seeing someone else. It was a different him, tucked in the binder, and a different Takashi holding it together.

They had a chance, once, to find those people again. Or what was left of them.

Adam had brushed his fingers through the shock of white in Takashi’s hair and pressed kisses to the scar on his nose and felt the way Takashi leaned into him like he was trying to reach something. Adam kept it closed up, though. He kept it far away and he lost it for both of them.

“Keith still thinks we’re going to get back together,” Takashi whispered in the night.

They didn’t want to sleep. It reminded Adam of leaving. The silence and the ticking wakefulness of the darkness around them reminded him that he had left, and that he would leave again.

“What does Keith know,” he mumbled.

“What were we like?” Takashi continue, blinking slowly. “We made him believe in us, somehow.”

“We were his family,” Adam sighed and rolled onto his back. He rubbed at his chin and blinked at the blurry ceiling and closed his eyes only to open them again and fight through his exhaustion. “We  _ are _ his family.”

“Yeah,” Takashi said and Adam could hear his smile. “We made him believe in love, Adam.”

* * *

He left before Keith came home, even as every cell in his body screamed just for a  _ hello _ and a  _ I’ll see you soon _ .

“Don’t tell him I was here,” Adam said.

“He’ll know.”

“Nah. He’ll be too sleep-deprived to think straight.”

“What do thirteen-year-olds do at sleepovers, anyways?”

“Knowing Matt and Katie—trouble. They do troubling things.”

Takashi hummed and smiled while Adam slipped into his shoes and they waved their goodbyes like nothing had happened.

Nothing at all.

* * *

He held himself together all the way home.

He made himself an early lunch and he took a long shower and then he went to his front closet and stood on his toes and dragged down the binder, dust and all.

He meant to get rid of it, once and for all. He meant to let go.

He sat with it on his bed and he didn’t open it and he barely breathed. And in the morning, with the last taste of Takashi washed from his skin and his lips and his memory, he put it back.

* * *

Keith was seventeen-years-old and the summer was ending and his university applications were making both him and Takashi tense and, frankly, dumb.

“Shopping,” Adam decided, breaking into Takashi’s apartment and then Keith’s bedroom.

“Go away!” Keith shouted, scurrying under his blankets.

“Shopping!”

“I hate shopping!”

“Stop shouting!” Takashi hollered from down the hall.

“I’m stealing Keith!” Adam shouted back.

They went for breakfast. Keith’s hair was wild and he scowled into his coffee and he snapped that he refused to look for shoes.

“Shoes,” Adam scoffed. “Since when do I take you shoe shopping?”

Keith squinted at him suspiciously.

They started with the big chain bookstore in the too-busy mall. Back-to-school sale signs littered the place: buy shoes! buy clothes! it’s a new year and it’s a new you!

“Fuck,” Keith said with feeling.

“Focus,” Adam said and poked him in the side.

They separated almost immediately, veering off to different sections of the store in silence. Adam caught glimpses of Keith, his hair tied back and his attention focused. He looked so grown up, now. He looked long and serious and uncomfortable in his skin.

It’s going to be okay, Adam wanted to tell him. You can leave and we’ll be fine.

They met up properly in the fantasy section, Keith with an armful of books and Adam with a roll of his eyes.

“Turns out,” Keith said. “I like shopping.”

“Uh huh,” Adam said.

They waited in line together, Keith ignoring every box of highlighters Adam shook at him.

They hit two more bookstores, including Keith’s favourite used bookstore near the university, and came back to Takashi’s with bags of books and an offering of coconut buns.

Takashi took the buns gratefully. “Doesn’t mean I forgive you,” he grumbled all the same, gesturing to the piles of books Keith was unpacking on his bedroom floor.

“This is my contribution,” Adam said. “To the whole—raising a teenager thing.”

“I hate you.”

Keith slapped a pile of paperbacks. It wobbled. “ _ This _ is back-to-school shopping,” he said over his shoulder.

“None of those books are for school!”

“They’re for my health,” Keith sniffed and sat back on his heels. “They’re for my—well-being.”

“Ugh,” Takashi groaned and tore into one of the coconut bun wrappers with his teeth.

“Don’t be a barbarian.”

“You two,” Takashi said, pulling plastic from his teeth. “Are bad for  _ my _ well-being.”

“Liar,” Adam said at the same time Keith shouted: “Liar!”

* * *

Home was like that. Easy and light and noisy. Home was, still, walking through the front door and harassing Keith and sharing knowing looks with Takashi. Adam had stopped calling Takashi his “ex” in his head years ago. And Takashi—

Takashi called him in the middle of the night: “I think Keith is hiding something.”

“Uh huh.”

“I’m serious!”

Takashi called him in the early morning: “I think this boyfriend thing is serious.”

“Keith never does anything halfway.”

“Do I—do I say something? Do I tell him—something?”

“About what?

“I don’t know. Stuff.”

“Do  _ not _ talk to him about sex.”

“I wasn’t going to!”

Takashi called him in the afternoon: “Good luck. In Vancouver.”

“It’s Vancouver. I don’t need luck.”

“Uh huh.”

“I’ll bring you back a souvenir. A fish-object.”

“How generous.”

Home was, still, Takashi’s laughter and encouragement and his bad cooking and his bad habits and his good habits.

Somehow, they were growing old together. And Keith was growing up between them.

* * *

Marriage.

“Pick a day!” Keith yelled over the phone, two weeks after their re-engagement.

(“Stop calling it that,” Takashi grumbled.)

“All in good time,” Takashi replied, his phone sitting face-up on the table.

Keith’s voice crackled as he continued: “It’s been ‘good time.’ It’s decision time!”

Adam grinned at Takashi, snacking on baby carrots and feeling his morning coffee settle in his stomach.

“Bye Keith,” Takashi said.

“February!” Keith said.

“Valentine’s Day?” came Lance’s voice in the background.

“No, not—”

“Not February,” Takashi said sweetly and hung up the phone.

“Not February?” Adam clarified, wiggling his toes.

“Get a new binder,” Takashi said.

* * *

He didn’t.

He opened a file on his computer and he made lists of things that felt weird but exciting: food, and guests, and places-they-could-get-married. Photographers.

He pulled the binder down, anyways. And he didn’t put it back.

“Let’s get married in the spring,” he said to Takashi.

“Move in first,” Takashi replied.

“I’m thinking,” Adam continued. “The mountains. Keith would like that. Except the mountains make him weird, and he’ll probably down some champagne and propose to Lance.”

Takashi choked.

“I’m kidding.”

Takashi tapped the bedspread between them once, twice, three times. “Don’t change the subject!” he managed around the noisy lump in his throat.

“I’ve been pretty focused.”

“Move in,” Takashi said.

“ _ You _ move in.”

“My apartment’s nicer.”

“Rude.”

“You’re here all the time.”

“Very rude.” Adam paused. “We’ll have to spend half our wedding-time-energy stopping Keith from drunkenly proposing.”

“He’s not going to propose,” Takashi insisted. “He’s too young.”

“Have you  _ seen _ the way they are?”

“Yeah,” Takashi sighed. “Reminds me of us. Speaking of—you should move in.”

Adam smiled.

“Move in with me.”

“Say ‘please.’”

“Not a chance.”

* * *

(They picked a day in early Summer, at a pretty hotel in the mountains with a golf course Adam could mock. His mother offered to help with the invitations. Colleen introduced them to a cheery photographer with spiky hair and a good grip on their camera. And Keith said: “Fucking finally.”

The day after they paid their deposit, Adam woke to Takashi poking him with the corner of a huge white binder.

“What?” he said through his sleepy haze.

“For the planning,” Takashi said. “For the wedding.”

“I’m electronic now.”

“Boring. Take the binder.”

“ _ You _ take the binder.”

“It’s going to be perfect,” Takashi promised, dropping the binder onto Adam’s lap. “I promise.”

Adam flopped back against the pillows and closed his eyes with a smile. “It’s going to be amazing.”

“We’re going to get married.”

“Yes,” Adam breathed, sinking slowly back to sleep.

And what a marriage it would be.)

* * *

(“What’s the planning look like?” Lance said one sunny afternoon, his elbows on the table and a plate of strawberries and waffles at his elbow. “For the wedding, I mean.”

“It looks like bills,” Adam mumbled, straightening his glasses and squinting at his screen.

Lance hummed. And then asked: “And flowers? Does it look like flowers?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do you ever think about just—eloping or whatever?”

“Sometimes,” Adam said again and finally looked away from his screen. “But this wedding’s not just for us.”

Lance smiled.)


End file.
